Monique Wittig Quotes

We can invent only with memory.

I don't think there is such a thing as pure imagination. I think it's a combination of memory and invention.

Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come of nothing.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.

Some things we forget. But many things we remember on the mental screen, which is the biggest screen of all.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

I remember this one time I had a dream about me writing a screenplay, and when I woke up, you know those dreams that feel so real, but I woke up and I was like, 'Oh my god I have this amazing screenplay I need to write down as soon as I wake up' and then I woke up and I was like what the heck was I dreaming of?

The truth can only be recalled, never invented.

Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

We all dream profusely every night, yet by morning we've forgotten ninety percent of what went on. That's why poets are such important members of society. Poets remember our dreams for us.

I'm impossible to forget, but I'm hard to remember.

Progress comes by experiment, and this from ennui that leads to voyages, wars, revolutions, and plainly to change in the arts of expression; that cries out to the imagination, and is the nurse of the invention whereof we term necessity the mother.

Now, that can be a traditional form or it can be something you're inventing. It can be the development of a metaphor, the working through of a metaphor.

Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.

You're a writer. Make it up.

There are people you remember and people you dream of.

Your memory and your senses will be nourishment for your creativity.

... if one can remember without loving, then couldn't one love without remembering?

You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.

A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.

I'm a writer and writers either have good memories or nothing at all.

To learn is to incur surprise-I mean really learning, not just refreshing our memory or adding a new fact. And to invent is to bestow surprise-I mean really inventing, not just innovating what others have done.

I love creating new things. It's kind of my job, it's what I do, and I really have fun with it.